That is why high street chains such as Woolworths, Zavvi and Habitat have made way for an endless parade of mobile-phone stores and charity shops.
Dubai Mall can be likened to a mini-New York -- even a Shake Shack is included among the endless parade of 5th Avenue stores like Bloomingdales, Galleries Lafayette, Saks, Cartier, Prada, Chopard and Van Cleef but with an Arabian sensibility layered on top.
The White Plains store will be in space being vacated by several smaller retailers in the mall, including Lechter's, Suncoast Pictures and Parade of Shoes.
As it spread to other states, gun control groups quickly complained about the parade of firearms in local stores.
Often there is more buzz on the sidewalk in front of the multiplex theatre a couple of blocks north, or amid the parade of mall-like retail stores that now line Broadway, than there is at Lincoln Center.
Still, even among the more august firms, the conventional consultant wisdom held that if established companies were to compete with the fast-moving visionaries in the parade of online banks and pet stores and office supply chains, they needed to move onto the Internet immediately.
PAYLESS SHOESOURCE INC., Topeka, Kan., the shoe seller, said it would exit its 181 Parade shoe stores by the end of its fiscal year in January.
It is serenaded weeks before it arrives by radio stations and heralded by a monthlong parade of tinsel in nearly every store window in town.
In the three dozen or so shows -- about 15 of them paid -- that the band has played in the last year, it has led a pet store's parade of dogs, marched naked across a long white table at a dot-com mogul's millennium party in TriBeCa, serenaded marathon runners and commandeered subway trains at midnight.
The festivities at the Cotton Bowl and at the store drew a parade of designers, including Manolo Blahnik, Zac Posen, Nicole Miller, Carolina Herrera, the native Texan Cece Cord (on left in photo at bottom right) and a shimmering contingent of the women they dress.
